Archive for seeing without shadows
…and colour was god
The earth was the heavens and the heavens the earth. Everything was alive and bursting with colour and colour was god, not the god of man. The hills became transparent, every rock and boulder was without weight, floating in colour and the distant hills were blue, the blue of all the seas and the sky of every clime. The ripening rice fields were intense pink and green, a stretch of immediate attention. And the road that crossed the valley was purple and white, so alive that it was one of the rays that raced across the sky. You were of that light, burning, furious, exploding, without shadow, without root and word. And as the sun went further down, every colour became more violent, more intense and you were completely lost, past all recalling. It was an evening that had no memory.
~ J Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti’s Notebook
Painting by Fritz Raugh
source – Fritz Raugh’s website
slipping a gear into oneness
On one unusually radiant day, I took a walk up the burn above the house and into a steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – mountains on both sides, and below, tiny stands of water which looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches. And there, quite suddenly, I slipped a gear. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. It was very brief, but I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.
~ Sara Maitland © 2008
From ‘A Book Of Silence’
http://www.saramaitland.com/Home.html
Source – http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/nov/08/sara-maitland-silence-addiction
perceiving without naming
We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be – to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.
Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists.
To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness.
Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.
~ Eckhart Tolle
Stillness Speaks
I in the Nothing
The dusky darkness spread like the network of a great tree. In an elm the thrush was singing. He was so hidden and one with the bushy twigs that I could only see him by his tail which twitched when his song altered. Everything else was motionless except a broken twig which stirred and swung by a strip of bark. As I went along I made an effort to climb out and get into these things – into the mysterious darkening and sealing of the earth, the quietening that is as the loveliest psalm of rest. And at last I did. I stood leaning on a gate. I was behind the sky. I was in the ground. I was in the space between the trees. My meaning grew in the earth and the firmament – I in the Nothing in which all is related.
The Winter Journal, p39
The Autobiography of Margiad Evans, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1943
source: the nonduality highlights
seeing without shadows
the awakened eye is the eye that perceives without labeling – we could also call it the innocent eye, or the eye of beginner’s mind.
Many artists and artisans have understood that the practice of drawing and engaging in creative encounters in the visual arts can – by making obvious one’s conditioned reactions – open the mind to another way of seeing, a way that transcends habitual dualistic assumptions.
There have been, and are, many wise teachers who speak of this transcendence of duality as one’s original or true state – a state which we seem compelled to seek and reject simultaneously. Their teachings are sometimes referred to as advaita, which means ‘one without a second’ – or more simply, non-duality. In this context the awakened eye is synonymous with the awakened I; this topic forms the wider agenda of this blog.
This blog – and the website - have been conceived as places where ideas and teachings on this topic put forward by artists, educators, scientists, philosophers, sages and saints, can be accessed. There will also be personal notes from she-who-scribbles, and hopefully plenty of useful links.
The title offers a bow of respect and gratitude to Frederick Franck, a true Renaissance Man, and one of my most influential teachers.
I hope you will find inspiration and encouragement here to support your inquiry, and that you realize that your awakened eye and your vast, open, non-dual understanding are here, this very moment, reading these words…
